As successful as The Blood of Dawnwalker has been – one million sales and counting, strong critical acclaim – it’s easy to forget how controversial its timer was when first announced. That you have to devote time to learning and upgrading skills only adds to this, and while it reinforces the importance of certain choices, not everyone can handle that pressure.
Well, you should be grateful because originally, it was quite a bit more restricted, per game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz to Eurogamer, “where it was harder to beat the game. But, after all of those voices, before release even, we knew that it could be a problem, and we rebalanced it this way to give the buffer for the people to not fear this.”
The Prologue, where we first experience the tragic circumstances that befall Coen and his family, remained unchanged, but the main game saw adjustments. “We were afraid that people would complain too much that it’s too restricted.”
How restricted is “too restricted,” though? “You needed to think about everything even more carefully. But we started to speak with Mateusz [Tomaszkiewicz, creative director] and the rest of the team about what we wanted to achieve, and we figured out that we don’t want to create a mini-game from it. We wanted to give the player the proper feeling and proper emotions in the main story.”
Because at the end of the day, the timer is serving The Blood of Dawnwalker’s narrative, not completely overtaking it. “This is the purpose of the main story, not to create a challenge for it,” said Tomaszkiewicz. And even if mods were created to remove the timer entirely as soon as the game launched, the general consensus among critics and players is that it doesn’t feel oppressive at all.
Since launching for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, The Blood of Dawnwalker has received bug fixes and performance improvements. However, there’s more to come – its first major post-launch update will bring a new, easier difficulty option tailored for those only interested in the story. Rebel Wolves is also working on the ever-popular New Game Plus, though there’s currently no ETA.
